Charlotte Brontë: Why Villette is better than Jane Eyre - Telegraph Charlotte Brontë: Why Villette is better than Jane Eyre Everybody knows Jane Eyre, but Charlotte Brontë's greatest and most original novel was her last, Villette Charlotte Brontë: her last novel, Villette, is 'an astonishing piece of writing', according to Lucy Hughes-Hallett Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy By Lucy Hughes-Hallett 9:32AM BST 21 Apr 2014 Charlotte Brontë wrote not one but two masterpieces. Most readers know Jane Eyre. Even non-readers feel they know it, because they have seen a film version, or just because it is a part of our common culture. But Villette, Brontë’s last and – to my mind – greatest novel, is less popular, perhaps because it is so uncompromising and so original. It is high time it was recognised as the blazing work it is. Reading it you enter an area of experience – of passion and disappointment and the violent return of the repressed – that has seldom been so lucidly articulated.

It is also an astonishing piece of writing, a book in which phantasmagorical set pieces alternate with passages of minute psychological exploration, and in which Brontë’s marvellously flexible prose veers between sardonic wit and stream-of-consciousness, in which the syntax bends and flows and threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire. “Villette! Villette!” wrote George Eliot. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” It was unlike the strong-minded Eliot to be reduced to exclamation marks and vague talk of a “something”. But Villette was so innovative for its time, and remains to this day so potently strange, that critics have struggled to find words to describe it. “There are so few books, and so many volumes,” wrote Eliot’s partner GH Lewes. “Among the few stands Villette.” Lewes thought it was unique. Lesser authors were “reverberating the vague noise of others”. Brontë spoke out boldly in a voice that was all her own. Villette is the most autobiographical of Brontë’s novels.

In it, she elaborates on the true story of her unrequited love for a married schoolmaster called Constantin Héger. In 1842 Brontë, then aged 26, went with her sister Emily to Brussels. There they worked as student-teachers in the Hégers’ school with the intention of perfecting their French, and returning home to set up a school of their own. Emily, miserably homesick for the Yorkshire moors, left first. Charlotte stayed for two years, and subsequently wrote Monsieur Héger a series of letters to which he, probably in obedience to his wife, never replied. Brontë saw him as her intellectual mentor, but the yearning tone of her letters, and the two novels for which her Belgian experiences provided her with raw material, make it obvious that she was in love with him. Related Articles Charlotte Bronte letter sells for £24,000 at auction 04 Sep 2013 In The Professor , her first novel, written shortly after she returned from Brussels, she disguised the relationship by making her central character a man. In Villette she reverses the sex-change and writes from a point of view very close to her own.

But standing at that point is a person who is far from being just Charlotte Brontë’s fictional alter ego. Out of the ordinary story of a lonely woman’s love of an unattainable man, Brontë fashions a novel that is at once an intensely erotic love story, a fierce attack on the conventions that doomed so many 19th-century women to submission and frustration, and a beautiful and inventive piece of poetic fiction. As Virginia Woolf wrote, Brontë was one of those writers whose “overpowering personality” means “they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things.” The Brontë myth would have us see Charlotte and her sisters as spinsters, timidly hiding behind male pseudonyms. Anyone who has read Villette knows that Woolf comes much closer to the truth. It is a fierce book, and an irrestibly compelling one. Its heroine, Lucy Snowe, is a narrator who tantalises the reader with all the technical virtuosity that Brontë – a modernist before the term was coined – could command.

There has seldom been a fictional heroine so physically plain and emotionally throttled, who is yet so sensuous, so intelligent and so keenly feeling. There has seldom been a first-person narrative that withheld so much from its readers, and yet communicated such terrible or such intimate emotion. Lucy arrives in Villette (a fictionalised Brussels) in search of a safe haven. She is in her twenties, without friends or family, and nearly destitute. Her early life has been traumatic in a way that is never described, but which has left her determined to avoid further trouble by rigorous self-control. “In catalepsy and dead trance I studiously held the quick of my nature,” she writes. At once she finds that her chosen refuge is as perilous as her past. On her first night in town she is lost in the dark, then led to safety by a handsome stranger who abruptly leaves her – a foretaste of what is to come. She becomes a teacher, loves first one man – who is out of her reach – and then another who is better suited to her but still tantalisingly hard to pin down. These relationships are charted with a wonderful delicacy.

But more fascinating even than the ebb and flow of Lucy’s complex emotional life is the social setting in which it is placed. Villette is crammed with superbly realised minor characters. We meet the school’s proprietor, Madame Beck – devious, clever, a generous housekeeper and a sensualist with a body “like a compact little pony”, who turns out to be a formidable villain. We meet Ginevra, the self-centred, exploitative young lady to whom the kind of happiness for which Lucy yearns comes so easily: Ginevra’s farcical love affairs lie behind the figure of the ghostly nun who brings a frisson of Gothic horror into the novel. We meet Paulina, the curiously adult child who grows up to become an eerily childlike adult. Her ambiguous character is Brontë’s comment on the way women must deny their own maturity if they are to please the men who want them sweet and innocent. But as well as being a funny, penetratingly observant realist novel, Villette is a visionary and fantastic depiction of a sequence of extreme emotional states.

The story progresses by way of a series of set-piece descriptions of public events: a night at the theatre; a headmistress’s birthday party; a picnic in a park on a public holiday. But Brontë, who was one of the first of the great Victorian novelists to experiment with fictional autobiography, was not going to confine herself to the visible and obvious. These set pieces – as well realised as a painting by Brontë’s contemporary William Frith – alternate with long passages during which Lucy Snowe is alone, and the narrative follows her whirling thoughts, her repressed but palpable emotions, and the way her mind reels under pressures both imaginary and actual. Villette is a love story with an adorable hero – every reader loves Monsieur Paul. It has a heartbreaking tease of a conclusion. (Brontë used the device of the double-ending a century before John Fowles played the same trick in The French Lieutenant’s Woman .) It is a powerful polemic. It tells the story of a socially marginalised woman bent on achieving economic independence. So far, so straightforwardly feminist. But it also bypasses conventional narrative to speak directly of things that are still, a century and a half later, hard to address.

What it tells us is that even an undesirable woman may be capable of exorbitant desire. Lucy Snowe, whose very name is cold (in an earlier draft she was called Lucy Frost) is more fiery than any more obviously romantic heroine. Like her beloved, the hot-tempered M Paul, she is a “bottled storm”. The ferocity of her tamped-down ardour has alarmed some readers. “I do not like the love, either the kind or the degree of it,” wrote Brontë’s contemporary Harriet Martineau, who was proud to earn her own keep as a writer, independently of any man. Lucy’s craving for erotic love repelled Martineau as much as it did the more conventionally minded, who found it unladylike or unchristian. Matthew Arnold called Villette “a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel”. Convulsed and constricted it is: convulsed by Lucy’s love, first for the handsome Dr John, and later for M Paul; constricted by her desperate struggle to deny and conceal that passion.

What Arnold failed to appreciate was that this conflict is at the heart of the book, and that the way the narrative form expresses it is brilliant. Lucy likens her own nature – one part loving and yearning, the other sternly self-controlling – to the Biblical figures Jael and Sisera. In the Old Testament story the warrior Sisera is killed by Jael, his enemy and a woman, who drives a tent-peg into his temple. Psychically, Lucy carries out similar violence on herself. The Sisera part of her longs (as the heroine) for love, and longs (as narrator) to admit it truthfully. Her Jael part relentlessly tortures and silences her. It is this struggle that makes Villette so highly charged and glitteringly strange. Like a dissident writing under a repressive regime, Lucy can only speak indirectly and so – like Bulgakov and Kafka in the 20th century – Brontë invents a metaphorical language in which to tell her tale, making of it, as Eliot said, “something… preternatural”. At a turning point in the story of Villette, Lucy buries some letters.

She has previously stored them, wrapped in silver paper, in a case, in a locked box, in a drawer, in a locked room. Now she goes out to buy yet another container. “I then made a little roll of my letters, wrapped them in oiled silk, bound them with twine and, having put them in a bottle, got the old Jew broker to stopper, seal and make it airtight.” This vessel she stows deep in a hole covered with a slate, with a layer of cement, with black mould and, finally, with thick ivy. But for all her obsessive care the “tomb” feels unsafe. “Sometimes I dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through the coffin-chinks.” Lucy’s attempt to repress the letters (they are from a man she loved who wasn’t interested in her) is as methodical as it is crazy, yet the energy of things hidden – of erotic desire, and of writing itself – proves irrepressible. Villette owes its tension, and its extraordinary power, to a similarly unsuccessful interment – to its narrator’s attempt to deny the story she is telling.

Lucy Snowe is a character as ardent and as strong willed as any of the Brontë sisters’ other heroines – as Wuthering Heights’ untameable Cathy, or as Jane Eyre, the apparently demure governess who is described by one who knows her well as being secretly a “bad animal”. What makes Villette unique is that Lucy uses her power against herself – and against us. She will not weaken. She will not confide in us. And yet – wonderfully for readers of this novel – her attempt to conceal the agony of her loneliness, the force of her personality and the depth of her love, ultimately fails. This failure is Brontë’s great success. She honours Lucy’s urge to conceal herself from us, but – with masterful duplicity – refuses to allow it. Try as she might to pass herself off as a dull, quiet little person, the vigour of Lucy Snowe’s true nature keeps showing through the narrative Brontë has ascribed to her. There’s no burying such a deeply felt love story, or such a vehement protest against stultifying convention.

In this magnificently vital book Lucy’s story bursts out of its confines, as shocking and beautiful as golden hair breaching the walls of a coffin. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s latest book The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio won the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, and is shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. Join her on January 18 for a one-day seminar on 'The Other Charlotte Brontë’ at Waterstones Piccadilly, as part of the programme of the Telegraph How To: Academy. Visit the How To: Academy website for more details on how to book Villette: Charlotte Bronte: 9780140620771: Literature: Amazon Canada Charlotte Bronte No Kindle device required. Download one of the Free Kindle apps to start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, and computer. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product Details Publisher: Penguin Classic; New edition edition (Aug.

1 1994) Language: English Product Dimensions: 11 x 3.5 x 18 cm Shipping Weight: 281 g --Virginia Woolf From the Publisher With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Bronte reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Bronte's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There, she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquetter. This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey--a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature. By twistedelastic on Nov.

8 2016 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase In a more minor key than the more famous Jane Eyre, also by Charlotte Bronte, Villette is a satisfying read, a psychologically interesting portrait of the Puritanical Lucy Snow, the narrator. It is also interesting, however, in that it is thought to be based on the personal experiences of Charlotte Bronte at the Hegers' school in Brussels, where she spent some time, and where she fell in hopeless love with a married professor. The portrait of the directress of the school where Lucy ends up living and teaching, and the characterization of Monsieur Paul, one of the two main male characters, are also absorbing--perhaps more so than those of the glittering young couple whose love story is seen from outside by the narrator. The detailed descriptions of Lucy's life as an impoverished lady in the days before a woman had any decent future but domestic service or teaching, provide fascinating glimpses into 19th C educational institutions, British views on foreigners, and Victorian society in general. This is not a heart-stopping Romance novel, but a thoughtful read; and one can make up one's own ending.... Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By vampsandtramps on April 29 2004 Format: Paperback As other reviewers have noted, this is a haunting tale, featuring the withdrawn yet passionate Lucy Snowe. Lucy is always trying to make the book about the other characters, and she feels awkward writing about herself and her own feelings. Through her evasion of her own importance, we still get a clear and moving portrait of the narrator. She glides over the incidents of her life, including a vague reference to a ship wreck, and focuses on the story of her friends, like the insufferable Ginevra Fanshawe. While these characters may be happier, more attractive, more liked, they do not have the feeling and intensity of Lucy. Although she tries to remain stoic, her passion does burst through every once and while, and those scenes are some of the most memorable. Otherwise she is patient and self-deprecating, and allows herself to be stepped on. She is a sympathetic, throughly believable character, but Ms. Bronte never gets too sentimental or pitying. This novel is gothic, romantic and realistic, set in a biblical and mythical framework.

There are ghosts and shadows, death and grieving, practical jokes and dry wit. To put in plainly, this is one of the best books I have ever read. Much much better and more mature than Jane Eyre. 3 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Ida on Jan. 22 2016 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase This book is... this book is hard to describe. Often while reading it I would have liked to talk about it with my husband... But so little happens in reality; so much happens in Lucy's mind. These two passages, I think, summarize it well: "Even to look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on future good. A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me—a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly. Alas!

When I had full leisure to look on life as life must be looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view. The hopes which are dear to youth, which bear it up and lead it on, I knew not and dared not know. If they knocked at my heart sometimes, an inhospitable bar to admission must be inwardly drawn. When they turned away thus rejected, tears sad enough sometimes flowed: but it could not be helped: I dared not give such guests lodging. So mortally did I fear the sin and weakness of presumption." "I concluded it to be a part of his great plan that some must deeply suffer while they live, and I thrilled in the certainty that of this number, I was one." This book is not for everyone. This book is about a profoundly depressed woman who has known small moments of joy only to be crushed further into depression after ward. This book is about a fiery nature hidden under layers and layers of ice. I believe, this book is about Charlotte herself. And I feel it to be about me, too... though I have less restraint and less strength than Lucy. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Daniel Myers on Dec 9 2001 Format: Hardcover What irks me about the other reader reviews is that so many of them seem to cast Lucy Snow's soul in modern terms in the hopes of convincing the readers of the reviews that the book is accessible to them. I take the opposite tack. It is WE who have something to learn from the Victorians and their masterworks, rather than (if time could be reversed) the other way around. Lucy Snow is a spiritual hero, a concept seemingly lost in our modern age, to judge by most of the reviews anyway. The very name "Lucy" signifies a spiritual light along with a sexual purity signified by "Snow." that all of us in the modern age would do well to ponder and reasses our own souls thereby. I realize, of course, that the term "soul" is dreadfully outdated for many readers. But read and learn that there is such a beautiful thing, not to be psychoanalyzed to dissolution. Read, for example: "No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that to cultivate happiness.

What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happpiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divive dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth blooms and golden fruitage of Paradise." Through all of Lucy's companionless travails through unrequited and partially requited love, we feel the own deep personal love and light shining from her deep sensitive soul. It reminds me of nothing so much as the poetry of Emily Dickinson...In fact, I would go so far to say that those without an appreciation of great poetry will gain little from reading this poetic novel. Read more › 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again.

Charlotte Bronte and William Makepeace Thackeray | Silver Ambrosia Charlotte Bronte and William Makepeace Thackeray by silverambrosia in Charlotte Bronte , George Smith , Miscellaneous , The Victorians , William Makepeace Thackeray Tags: Amelia Sedley , Becky Sharp , Charles Dickens , Charlotte Bronte , Dombey and Son , female characterisation , George Smith , Jane Eyre , Lucy Snow , novels , sentimentalism , Shirley , The Victorians , Vanity Fair , Villette , William Makepeace Thackeray Charlotte Bronte’s tremendous admiration for William Makepeace Thackeray is well known. Not only did she express reverence for his work and belief in his abilities in biblical terms in her famous preface to the second edition of ‘Jane Eyre’, (1) but her personal correspondence is replete with praise of, and commentary on his novels. I liked Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ but the zealousness and intensity of Bronte’s praise for Thackeray has always puzzled me a little. Several reasons underpin this slight perplexity at Charlotte’s almost boundless regard for the author of ‘Vanity Fair’.

There are radical discrepancies between the two authors in their conception and delineation of female characters; Bronte being far more naturalistic and egalitarian than her contemporary in this respect. Thackeray’s ideal women were not exactly simplistic but were heavily sentimentalised: ‘Amelia’ of ‘Vanity Fair’ is a loving, soft-hearted, doting wife and mother (she, in significant respects, embodies Victorian ideals of womanhood). She is also weak, undiscerning, and possesses no real notion of selfhood independent of her status as wife and mother. Amelia is wholly unintellectual. Thackeray decidedly disliked intellectual women, and while ‘Amelia’ is subjected to significant criticism in the novel, there is no denying that Thackeray was simultaneously drawn to, and in a large part upheld, the model of womanhood she represented. Thackeray repeatedly sought to distinguish himself from Dickens by his emphasis on ‘realism’: resistance to drawing caricatures and eschewal of too many improbable plot contrivances. (2) There are important thematic differences between the authors as well.

Though Thackeray partially idealises Amelia, ‘Vanity Fair’ exposes the tyranny weak people like her can also exert, their capacity for selfishness and their desire for domination. In a work of Dickens, it is probable that a character like Amelia would have been uncritically extolled until the final chapter. However, stylistically, Dickens and Thackeray are much closer than is often acknowledged. For all the ‘Greek fire of his sarcasm’,(3) gushing sentimentality is as much a fixture in Thackeray’s work as it is in Dickens. Indeed, in the case of the former, the narratorial voice not infrequently becomes tinged with smugness. Lest I be misunderstood I do think that both Dickens and Thackeray were genuinely great authors, but aspects of their writing and characterisation do ruffle me. Their heroines, be it ‘Amelia Sedley’ of ‘Vanity Fair’ or ‘Florence Dombey’ of ‘Dombey and Son’ are a far cry from the ‘Jane Eyre’s’ or ‘Lucy Snow’s’ of Bronte’s novels.

Bronte’s work is marked by a naturalism that is not measured up to by either Dickens or Thackeray. She exhibits the interior lives, and interesting and expanded minds of her heroines with a skill, eloquence, and power which is matched by few, if any, of her contemporaries. Bronte’s heroines were highly intelligent, intellectual women (indeed, how could they be otherwise when they often constituted varied versions of Charlotte herself at different stages of her life). As Jane observes as she wanders about the halls and grounds of Thornfield: “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” (4) In Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Shirley’, Shirley (a heroine Charlotte modelled on her sister Emily) Shirley remarks to Caroline: “If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil. Their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.

Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other’s creations—worshipping the heroine of such a poem, novel, drama—thinking it fine, divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.’” (5) It can safely be assumed that Charlotte Bronte here is giving expression to her own objections regarding the way women have been characterised by her eminent male contemporaries. Indeed the ‘half-doll, half-angel’ woman and ‘fiend’ at the other end of the spectrum sound remarkably like ‘Amelia Sedley’ and ‘Becky Sharp’ of ‘Vanity Fair’. I actually think that despite Thackeray’s emphasis on ‘realism’ Becky at times appears to be something of a caricature herself. Even amongst the passages of extensive praise for Thackeray, Charlotte did occasionally voice these objections. She, however, never really expands on this theme.

In an 1852 letter to George Smith she writes: “As usual, he is unjust to women; quite unjust. There is hardly any punishment he does not deserve for making Lady Castlewood peep through a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid. Many other things I noticed that, for my part, grieved and exasperated me as I read; but then, again, came passages so true, so deeply thought, so tenderly felt, one could not help forgiving and admiring.”(6) While Bronte had almost unabated enthusiasm for Thackeray’s writing and faith in his calling as the ‘first social regenerator of the day’, Thackeray’s own opinion of Charlotte Bronte and her novels was far more mixed. He was considerably moved by ‘Jane Eyre’ and recognised the genius of the woman who had penned it,(7) but their personal interactions were marked by an uneasiness and perhaps mutual misunderstanding.

(8) George Smith, the publisher and close friend of both Charlotte Bronte and William Makepeace Thackeray offers the following significant insight: “Thackeray’s wit was not a ready one and he had not the quickness necessary for repartee. A clever woman always, and easily, had the better of him in that respect, and, to tell the truth, Thackeray was not fond of the society of what are called “clever women”; women, that is, whom he felt to be critical and with whom talk involved any mental strain. For that reason he did not like Charlotte Bronte, and the two did not get on well together. She was vexed because he, in his talk with her, would never be serious about his literature. He would talk in a bantering and burlesque way, as though he were ashamed of it.

But this was only by way of defence against Charlotte Bronte’s earnest and heroic views of the “sacredness” and “dignity” of literature.”(9) On pursuing ‘Villette’ Thackeray stated “There’s a fire and fury raging in that little woman, a rage scorching her heart which doesn’t suit me.” (10) His condescending and supercilious extended comments on the novel are contained within an 1853 letter directed to Lucy Baxter: “So you are all reading Villette to one another- a pretty amusement to be sure- I wish I was hearing you and smoking of a cigar the while…. And it amuses me to read the author’s naïve confession of being in love with two men at the same time; and her readiness to fall in love at anytime. The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good…she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with.

But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny of good looks, thirty years old I should think, buried in the country and eating her own heart up there, and no Tomkins will come…here is one a genius, a noble heart longing to mate itself and destined to wither away into old maidenhood with no chance to fulfil the burning desire.” (11) I understand Charlotte Bronte’s regard for William Makepeace Thackeray to a significant extent. I do think he was a fine writer, even if his prose did (not infrequently) lapse into sentimental gush, and even if his female characters were at times poorly conceived. There are numerous passages of ‘Vanity Fair’ which I genuinely admire (most notably the confrontation scene between Dobbins and Amelia near the end of the novel). But I don’t think that the flaws identified above are insignificant, and accordingly I find it somewhat puzzling that Charlotte Bronte hero-worshiped him to the extent that she did.

© The Best Bronte Books By Juliet Barker | Jul 27, 2012 Juliet Barker's landmark biography, The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family , has just received an update--making the feat of chronicling literature's most famous family even more heroic, and making the 1,200 page volume even more comprehensive. Barker, the former curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Howarth, ranked the books of the sisters for Tip Sheet. Ranking Jane Austen’s novels may cause controversy – but it’s a storm in a tea-cup compared to the elemental forces unleashed when asked to choose between the Brontë novels. The three weird sisters of Haworth arouse passions like no other writers: Austen has fans but the Brontës have devotees and, believe me, there’s a very big difference – criticising Pride and Prejudice doesn’tprovoke a baying lynch-mob in quite the same way as hinting that all is not perfection in Wuthering Heights.

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have consistently spent decades in the top five best-selling and most popular novels of all time, so doesn’t that make them the obvious candidates for joint first? But I’d like to make the case for... 1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne is the also-ran of the Brontë family yet The Tenant shares all the virtues of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – powerful writing, gripping storyline, dramatic tension and passionate authorial involvement – whilst remaining firmly rooted in reality (no Rochester fooling his guests by disguising himself as a gypsy-woman or Heathcliff digging up his lover’s corpse). It’s the only Brontë novel not to feature orphans and/or dysfunctional families and it’s steeped with quiet humour. But its heroine, Helen Huntingdon, is a woman who flouts every convention by leaving her husband to save their child whom he is corrupting, earning her own independent living and eventually herself proposing marriage to the man she loves. Forget Jane Eyre – this really is Victorian feminism at its most radical! 2.

Jane Eyre - Who could fail to identify with Charlotte’s brave little orphan who refuses to be crushed by her bullying cousins, her sadistic head-master, or even the domineering man she loves. ‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?’ she demands of Rochester. ‘I am a free human being, with an independent will’, she tells him and how we cheer as she goes on to prove it, refusing to be his mistress rather than his wife and rejecting the passionless St John Rivers. Jane Eyre doesn’t win first place because it has its silly moments (as in the gypsy-woman episode) but mainly because it was an unnecessary and cowardly cop-out to give Jane a newly discovered family and fortune before she returns to Rochester. 3. Wuthering Heights - What can you say about the world’s greatest love-story, beloved of millions of hormonal teenagers and the silver screen? Except that it most definitely is not a love story. A tale of thwarted passions, obsession and revenge indeed – but not of genuine love.

Heathcliff and Cathy are two sides of the same coin: ‘I am Heathcliff!’ says Cathy, ‘he’s more myself than I am’. When they cannot have what they want, their mutual response is to destroy each other. There is love in the book, but it’s not the ravings of Heathcliff and Cathy: it’s the blossoming affection between Heathcliff’s innocent victims Hareton and Catherine. There’s no denying the sheer power of Wuthering Heights, nor the cleverness of its structure, but as every film director has discovered, the death of Cathy less than half way through the book, though necessary to the plot, leaves the reader feeling short-changed. 4. Villette - Charlotte’s last completed novel. Exquisitely crafted by an artist at the height of her powers, Villette is a return to the theme of master and pupil. Lucy Snowe’s cold exterior shell hides a passionate Brontë interior: she loses her first love to the pretty and wealthy Paulina, but lands her own true admirer in the sardonic Professor Paul Emanuel.

But she doesn’t ‘deserve’ to find happiness and therefore, in a deliberately enigmatic ending, her professor is presumed drowned at sea before they can marry. Stylistically Villette is Charlotte’s most successful novel but its subdued atmosphere and the problematic nature of its central character make it an acquired taste. 5. Agnes Grey - If you thought Charlotte created the first plain heroine in Jane Eyre then think again: it was Anne in this deceptively simple tale of virtue rewarded. Drawing on her own experiences, Anne spares nothing in her portrayal of the miserable existence of the governess: the haughty, unfeeling treatment of her employers, the vicious behaviour of their spoilt children and the helplessness of the poor governess herself, living in a wealthy household but despised and excluded by family and servants alike. Agnes, unlike Anne herself, finds escape in the love of a good man. It’s an unsensational tale but it would be hard to find a more hard-hitting picture of the trials and tribulations of governess-life in the nineteenth century. 6. The Professor - Charlotte’s first novel written for publication but rejected by everyone to whom she submitted it.

The reasons are obvious, especially when it’s compared to her later work. The central mistake is in having a male narrator – no one excels in capturing the female voice like Charlotte – but Frances Henri, with whom he falls in love, is one of Charlotte’s most charming female creations. There are glimpses of the brilliance Charlotte would later show as an author, particularly when she draws on her own experiences as a pupil-teacher in Belgium, but The Professor is really a juvenile work – quite literally, since it originated in the Angrian tales she had written since childhood. 7. Shirley - Last, but by no means least. A worthy book, written to highlight the plight of unmarried women, it’s also the only novel Charlotte actually researched, setting it in the period of the Luddite riots and consulting old newspapers ‘in order to understand the spirit of those eventful times’. But Charlotte wasn’t a social reformer or historian – she was quintessentially a novelist of the female heart – and that’s what’s missing from the book. It’s easy to understand why since, in the course of writing it, she lost all three of her siblings. It’s a miracle she wrote it at all – but it feels laboured.

So, like the classic school report, its full marks for effort – but could do better. ADVERTISEMENT Villette : Charlotte Brontë : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive Reviewer: dahszil - favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite - January 8, 2016 Subject: fine readers, a novel by one of the greats but for those of us for various reasons--my excuse being speech/hearing defect, and chronic neurosis--don't "parlay the French" it becomes difficult. My rule of thumb is that an author's most popular novel is not their best. And i apply it here. Villette is a great novel, better than Jane Eyre. I always tell people English is my second and ONLY language :)or my first language is Americanese :) ..... I suppose it is a soft spot in me but its worth listening just to hear the British female and most of the non british female voices. Chip, who read the first chapter, has that classic American male voice over, radio and tv voice of the late 1950's to perhaps early 70's was also nice to hear, nostalgia i suppose. again, thank you so much Librivox, IA, volunteers and staff.

update: happy and thankful for free online bot translators for the French passages :) just have to open text while listening and copy and paste. i know online bot translators make mistakes but its better than nothing. Chapter 14 – The Fête read by Ophelia Darcy. Ophelia did an amazing job in all her sections but this one was perfection. Her voice which is very pretty but she was also fierce in this chapter's emotional dialogue, and going from pleasant narrator to complex emotional dialogue so seamlessly. chapter 21: one can apply Freud's basic paradigm of id, ego, and superego. early in the chapter when our protagonist meaning of "reason" can be interpreted that part of our personality, when it is out of control, is giving the horse whip to us, we feel quilty when we should not, we are not living up to those ideals put into our heads by others in the formative years and still later by those who prey on our vulnerabilities(ironically called the "other directed" who "pull our strings" to make us feel bad). luckily the good angel = the id and ego give her serenity enough to finally sleep.

But in total our protagonist Lucy Snow is nothing less than a Heroine because her life was mostly alone conquering a mountain of deprivation even if the ending is tragic(not finished with book yet) . I love her acerbic rejoinders and wit and essential goodness. chapter 22(?), the spooky nun: a trick by the school matron carried out by lower level operative or by an operative of the priest and the church? or in conspiracy with the school and catholic church together ?, or hallucination due to emotional exhaustion ? chapter 23: what a superb description by Bronte via Lucy of the great aging singer. and then a pedestrian fire breaks out, and seemingly the whole audience is seemingly "awoken", ironic. This is one my favorite collaboratives. great group of readers dahszil Reviewer: katknit - favoritefavoritefavoritefavorite - August 11, 2009 Subject: Villette: Teaching and Learning The heroine of this lesser known of Charlotte Bronte's novels is called Lucy Snowe, which means "light" and "cold".

Thrown upon her own resources at the tender age of 14, Lucy sets out for France and, by the skin of her teeth, lands a job at a girls' school in Villete. As her name suggests, Lucy holds herself aloof from all the usual interests of young women. Coincidence and improbability plays major roles in the plot of this novel, and if the reader is intolerant of such, the book will not satisfy. Rich in symbolism, Villette serves as a metaphor for the lives of women in Victorian Europe. Particularly striking is the mystery of the spectral nun who appears in garret and garden cloister. For the modern reader, Villette suffers from too much "sermonizing." It's possible, however, to balance the religiosity with the humor invested in relatively minor characters, such as the proto-feminist Ginevra Fanshawe, who "has suffered less than any" other woman in Lucy's world. Ginevra is refreshingly, sometimes comedically, unrestricted by the conventions of her society. It requires but little imagination to hear the voice of Charlotte herself, who indeed lived much of her life in similar circumstances, in the thoughts and soliloquies of Lucy.

In the end, Lucy's defensive remoteness is breached, but the reader is left to decide exactly how her story plays out. DOWNLOAD OPTIONS Villette Audiobook | Charlotte Bronte | Audible.com "Charlotte Bronte at Her Best" The Bronte sisters followed the writer's golden rule: "Write about what you know." Their limited but intense life experiences informed their fiction. Villette is IMHO, Charlotte Bronte at her very best. She is in command of her craft. In her most famous work and a favorite of mine, Jane Eyre, she used some tricks to move the story such as the unknown voices to bring Jane Eyre back to Mr. Rochester. Villette's Charlotte didn't need any tricks, just straight honest writing. In a scene in "Mr. Holland's Opus", Mr. Holland tries to explain to the lead singer how a particular Gershwin song should be interpreted. He said it expressed the "yearning to belong" of the young woman. While mostly unspoken, that same heart rending yearning is the soul of this work. I think Karen Cass's particularly wonderful performance made the raw heart-felt emotions of Lucy Snow accessible, even more so than the book.

This emotion is understated but it is always there and one instinctively knows it runs deep. Ms. Cass also highlights those little flashes of Bronte humor which are not always apparent to a thick headed lug such as me. I am always struck how a Bronte heroine can take a punch, then get up, put themselves in order then go to face life's next challenge. They are not lachrymose. I think the Bronte sisters were cast from the same high grade metal. Charlotte Bronte left the ending to the reader's discretion. If I was doing the movie, I know the ending. Villette Essay - Critical Essays - eNotes.com Critical Essays link Link Beneath the surface story that resembles so many other romance novels of the Victorian period, Charlotte Brontë examines in Villette several important and enduring questions about women’s roles in society and their obligations to others and to themselves. Brontë originally intended to name her heroine Lucy Frost; the name and the change are significant. Although both names convey the heroine’s cold nature, Frost suggests a frigidity not softened by the paradoxical warmth conveyed by snow.

There is significance in the given name as well; Lucy calls to mind images of lumination or lucidity but also suggests the pride exhibited by the first light-bearer, Lucifer. Lucy Snowe is a proud young woman, too proud on occasion to reveal her innermost thoughts not only to other characters but also to readers. As a result, she is an unreliable narrator, and readers are often left wondering how to interpret the actions of those whose stories Lucy relates, or those of the heroine herself. Brontë’s chief concern in Villette is to expose and examine the role of women in her society. Having been the jilted lover in a triangle that included an older teacher when she was a governess, Brontë fully understands the plight of her heroine. She realizes the expectations society places on women such as Lucy, who are constricted in their opportunities for both economic and personal advancement. Although she seldom talks candidly to the reader, Lucy Snowe is clearly a woman with a sensitive nature and a strong personal desire to succeed in the world on her own terms and to make choices about her lifestyle. Unfortunately, being a single woman in her century, she finds herself circumscribed by...

(The entire section is 704 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access BBC - Culture - The greatest heroines of all time Literature The greatest heroines of all time It is 200 years since the birth of Charlotte Brontë, who in Jane Eyre created one of fiction’s most memorable heroines. Samantha Ellis explains why some characters endure. By Samantha Ellis 11 April 2016 A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf sat down to re-read Jane Eyre for Charlotte Brontë’s centenary. She was worried it would seem antiquated, but instead, she was so absorbed and exhilarated she couldn’t put it down, and when she did, she wondered how Charlotte had done it. How had she written a novel that still seemed so fresh after so many years? The secret was, she decided, the heroine, who pervaded every line and every image.

“Think of Rochester,” wrote Woolf, “and we have to think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again there is Jane Eyre. Think of the drawing-room, even, those ‘white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers’, that ‘pale Parian mantelpiece’ with its Bohemia glass of ‘ruby red’ and the ‘general blending of snow and fire’– what is all that except Jane Eyre?” Another hundred years have gone by, and Jane feels just as present. Her demands for justice and for happiness seem just as authentic, as vital, as urgent as they did to Woolf and, perhaps, to Charlotte herself. View image of Jane Eyre Woolf liked Wuthering Heights too – she thought Emily the better poet – and found the two Catherines in Wuthering Heights “the most lovable women in English fiction.” It’s a startling description. Wilful, contrary Cathy is not conventionally lovable. But that is the point.

That’s why she’s the heroine for good girls who want to imagine being bad; to imagine running around the moors in a high wind, loving a villain with a heart of flint, who loves them back so hard that he gnashes his teeth and dashes his head against a tree until he bleeds. And for die-hard Wuthering Heights fans, Jane’s tale of hard work, patience and marrying her boss just can’t compare. Cathy is the heroine for good girls who want to imagine being bad It is rare to find a reader who loves both heroines. Janeites point out (and they are right) that Cathy is a snob. She is selfish and violent. She spends most of the book miserable, some of it mad, and does not get a happy ending. View image of Jane and Rochester And Jane is so bold! She is clever, and not afraid to show it. She sticks to her guns. She gets what she wants. And it’s hard not to love her when she asks Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?

You think wrong!” Or when she insists she is talking to him “as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal – as we are!” It’s a stark contrast to Cathy’s declaration “I am Heathcliff!” which makes love sound like a rather terrifying merging, a loss of self. And yet (and I confess that for a long time, Cathy was the only heroine for me) love sometimes feels that way. ‘Hunger, rebellion and rage’ One reason the Brontë heroines have stood the test of time is because they are such fun to argue about. They can’t be pinned down. They are dazzlingly complex. They are messy, flawed and difficult and all the better for it. When Charlotte tried to simplify things in Shirley, giving all the passion to one heroine and all the denial to another, she drained the life out of both. And neither Shirley nor Caroline inspires the same devotion as Jane or Cathy. In Villette, Charlotte went back to what she did best, creating a heroine, Lucy Snowe, whose lust and fury are perpetually at war with her vehement attempts to be cool, unruffled.

“I, Lucy Snowe, was calm” she says and we know she is lying through her teeth, and it is that conflict that makes us keep on reading. This was the novel that made Matthew Arnold say Charlotte’s mind contained nothing but “hunger, rebellion and rage”. Lucy hasn’t been as popular as Jane, perhaps because she is so incredibly prickly, so deeply unlikeable; an unreliable narrator who locks the reader out, a heroine who refuses to be a heroine. But I wonder if her time is coming. There has been a backlash against likeable heroines. From Claire Messud’s sour female artist in The Woman Upstairs, to Gillian Flynn’s psychopathic Amy in Gone Girl, to the man-stealing Jenn in Helen Walsh’s The Lemon Grove, novelists have been championing mean girls, villainesses and anti-heroines. Perhaps Lucy might yet eclipse Jane. View image of Gone Girl If the Brontës had written more straightforward heroines, they wouldn’t inspire such excellent fan fiction Or perhaps Anne Brontë’s heroines might get a look-in. Always in her sisters’ shadow, Anne was in fact the first to write about a governess finding fulfilment, in Agnes Grey.

And in her fierce second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s heroine Helen Graham escapes an abusive marriage to forge an independent life. Charlotte hated the book, and did her best to suppress it after Anne died, but feminists have rediscovered it, and Sam Baker recently gave it a clever remix in her thriller, The Woman Who Ran, about a war photographer hiding out in Yorkshire. View image of Sargasso This is another reason the Brontë heroines are still being read so fervently; they are constantly being rewritten. We can’t decide how we feel about them so we keep going back into the stories, trying to spin them different ways. And the novels are robust enough to take any number of rewrites. Jean Rhys found Jane Eyre so problematic that she flipped the perspective in Wide Sargasso Sea, turning the madwoman in the attic into the heroine. And last year I was thrilled to discover Alison Case’s Nelly Dean, which puts Wuthering Heights’s pragmatic housekeeper centre stage. There are rewrites galore in Tracy Chevalier’s new short story collection, Reader I Married Him, in which 21 writers respond to Jane’s most famous line.

If the Brontës had written more straightforward heroines, they wouldn’t inspire such excellent fan fiction. It is because they confound us and intrigue us that they don’t let us go. ‘Three weird sisters’ It is also because the Brontës themselves have become heroines. Meet Jane, Cathy and Helen and you also meet Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Ever since Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1855, Charlotte and her sisters have seemed as vivid as anyone they put on the page. And even Charlotte, who once said she wanted “to be forever known”, couldn’t have imagined 70,000 people a year paying to wander round her home, staring, awestruck at her stockings in a vitrine (admiring the darning–“such tiny stitches!” said a woman from Missouri on my last visit); or couples, hand in hand, following signs in Japanese to what is now called the ‘Brontë waterfall’.

View image of (Credit: The Keasbury-Gordon Photograph Archive / Alamy Stock Photo) Right now, a film crew is building a replica of the parsonage where Charlotte grew up on the moors, and I am not the only Brontë fan breathlessly following its progress on the Keighley News website. The “three weird sisters”, as Ted Hughes called them, and their heroines, still fascinate. And which modern heroines will we still be reading in 200 years? I don’t think we’ll care much about Bella Swan, of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Bella’s favourite novel is Wuthering Heights, but her vampire boyfriend hates it. For him, “The characters are ghastly people who ruin each other’s lives.” (He is, it must be said, a nasty piece of work himself.) The Twilight love triangle owes much to Cathy’s story of being torn between two men, but unlike Cathy, Bella is a clumsy drip. Unlike Cathy, Bella is a clumsy drip There are more echoes of Wuthering Heights in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. Katniss Everdeen lives in a dystopian future where children have to fight to the death on TV.

She has to choose between two men, a kind baker called Peeta (who is basically Edgar) and a rebellious hunter called Gale (who owes much to Heathcliff). The choice is complicated by Katniss’s struggle to survive, and by her political awakening. You can argue that the ending is too conventional, you can argue about whether Katniss makes the right choice, you can argue about the politics – but the very fact there is so much to argue about makes me think that Katniss is a heroine who will last. View image of Katniss Virginia Woolf thought that Charlotte Brontë was one of those writers powered by “some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions.” In her own novels Woolf would create heroines like To the Lighthouse’s Lily Briscoe (another keeper), who finds her voice, who recognises her own ardour, whose passions can’t be contained, not even in the pages of the book.

And maybe that is really why these heroines last, because they make our own long-buried feelings come to life. Samantha Ellis’s book, How to be a Heroine, is published by Vintage. She is writing a book about Anne Brontë. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter . This story is a part of BBC Britain – a series focused on exploring this extraordinary island, one story at a time. Readers outside of the UK can see every BBC Britain story by heading to the Britain homepage ; you also can see our latest stories by following us on Facebook and Twitter . And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Question: Lucy Snow is the heroine of which Charlotte Bronte novel?
Answer: Villette